


i'd give my last breath to keep us alive

by heliantheae



Series: i think it's called my destiny that i am changing [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ba Sing Se, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28759476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliantheae/pseuds/heliantheae
Summary: What a riot.
Series: i think it's called my destiny that i am changing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2108493
Comments: 8
Kudos: 90





	i'd give my last breath to keep us alive

**Author's Note:**

> hello, wow. i am back, this time with what could, if you squint, be considered a plot. title from fugitive by the indigo girls.

Zuko had been having a perfectly serviceable evening before the riot started. 

Wait. Let’s back up. Zuko was pleasantly tipsy on some sort of violet-rose liquor so sweet it made Jianjun cough, and he was trying to have a philosophical conversation with the older guard. It was difficult given the rate at which Jianjun was consuming potato-choke chips, some sort of beer, and his general lack of interest in the difference between justice and revenge. Zuko was managing.

“Boy,” Jianjun says blearily after a particularly inspired rant about normative ethics. “This is what we have judges for.”

“Yes,” Zuko agrees, “but what about our moral responsibility as guards?”

“Our moral responsibility to…?”

“Protect people,” says Zuko. “That woman that killed her husband—it should never have come to that. We should have helped her.”

“How?” Jianjun wants to know. “People in situations like that don’t generally go around advertising it.”

Zuko frowns. “I guess,” he says. “But I don’t think we should have arrested her.”

“She murdered her husband!”

“He has it coming! And we didn’t do our jobs, so she did them for us.”

“Our job isn’t to murder people.”

“I would have made an exception,” Zuko says darkly. “And anyway, in the chapter of the guard rulebook about lethal force—Yaochuan made me read that one twice—it says there are circumstances where it’s acceptable.”

“When your life is in danger. We’re not vigilantes.” 

Zuko considers this, along with an old theater mask stuffed in his sock drawer. “I’m going to testify at her trial and recommend a reduced sentence,” he decides instead of continuing that line of conversation.

“You have to testify anyway,” Jianjun reminds him. 

“Yes, but she was in the right.”

“She killed somebody.”

“I’ve killed somebody,” Zuko points out magnanimously. “You probably have too. Should we be in prison or sent to the mines?”

“War is dif—when did you kill someone?”

“The first time, or most recently?” Zuko asks, waving at the bartender for more of the flowery hangover in the making.

“You’re sixteen,” Jianjun says a bit blankly. 

Zuko blinks at him. “Well, yeah.” 

And that’s when the alarm bells begin to ring. Zuko’s first thought is that there’s a fire. The buildings of the Middle and Upper Rings are primarily made of stone, but the Lower Ring is wood through and through. He listens as the chiming pattern repeats. Not a fire. That’s good, he supposes, given that he has no desire to reveal himself as a firebender by trying to put it out. 

“Riot,” says Jianjun. 

They listen for a moment longer.

“They’re calling in all off duty guards,” Zuko says. 

“That’s us.”

Zuko eyes him. He’s perfectly capable of burning the alcohol out of his blood, but he doubts nonbenders, particularly those from the Earth Kingdom, have the same ability.

“Can you even walk in a straight line?” Not that it matters. Failure to answer a summons like this, no matter how sick or inebriated you claim you were when you heard it, is punishable by time in the mines. 

Jianjun squints at him instead of answering. “Are you steaming?”

“No,” Zuko lies as the alcohol evaporates through his pores, stinging as it does so. “Come on, stay by me.”

“I’ve been a guard for eight years,” Jianjun complains. “And I was a soldier before that. I can take care of myself.”

Zuko guides him out of the bar. In the street, they can hear the distant roar of an angry crowd. “What’s got them riled up?” 

“The Dai Li disappeared Guiren, I think. Not that you heard that from me.”

“The baker on the corner of 6th and Hao?”

“That’s the one,” says Jianjun. 

“Popular guy,” Zuko notes. The roar from the crowd is getting louder. 

“Complained about the cost of flour rising. Said the Fire Nation troops closing in was making trading hard.”

Zuko cuts his eyes to the older guard. “There’s no war in Ba Sing Se.”

“Of course not,” Jianjun says. “That’s why the Dai Li had to take him away.” 

“Of course,” says Zuko. “Did they have to do it on our day off, though?” 

Jianjun shrugs. “Guess so. You got your baton?”

“No. Do you?”

“No,” sighs Jianjun. “Nearest guard station is the one on 8th, isn’t it?”

“Sounds right to me.”

They walk—well, Zuko walks, Jianjun mostly stumbles—to the guard station on 8th. A harried-looking woman shoves batons and armor at them, then waves them back out the door to dress in the street with a group of other guards in various states of dress and sobriety. 

“Where are you two from?” one asks, hopping on one foot as he tries to get a steel-toed boot on the other. 

“The station on 13th,” Jianjun tells him. “We were in the area, though.”

“Better bars this way,” the man agrees, likely because Zuko still smells a little like violet-rose liquor, and Jianjun’s eyes are bloodshot. “Ready for this?”

“Is anyone ever?” another guard mumbles.

They march toward the sound of shouting and breaking wood. Zuko has never actually seen a proper riot. His years at the Fire Palace were relatively sheltered, at least from the general population’s troubles. His years hunting the Avatar had taken place primarily on a ship and in tiny, dusty Earth Kingdom villages. There hadn’t been an opportunity.

He’s seeing a proper riot now. The crowd seethes like one furious, collective animal as stalls belonging to long-since-fled street vendors are crushed. Zuko takes a deep breath and wades into the fight, Jianjun at his side.

This isn’t like a bar fight. It’s not like a naval battle. It’s nothing training could ever have prepared him for. He raps knuckles and elbows with his baton, shouting at the raging denizens of the Lower Ring to _go home, damn it_. It’s not these people’s faults; life in Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring isn’t easy, not with the war just outside the walls and the Dai Li’s iron grip strangling them from within the city. 

If this were Caldera City, his father would line up every single participant and execute them. It would be a generation at least before anyone dared to riot again if Sozin’s actions were anything to go by. 

He keeps Jianjun on his right side, no matter how nervous having his left side unguarded makes him. The man really shouldn’t be here, but that didn’t matter. 

“Traitor,” a man in a dirty green shirt spits at him.

Zuko gets him in the ribs with his baton and doesn’t feel bad about it.

He and Jianjun are alone in a roiling sea of green. Within sight but not within reach, other pockets of guards lay about them with their batons. They’re in the thick of things here. The bells keep tolling, and the crowd keeps roaring. 

Time blurs. He and Jianjun have their backs to a seamstress’s shop. Zuko has a bruise forming on his shoulder where someone hit him with what had looked like the leg of a bar stool. Jianjun has a cut on his forehead. It’s bleeding the way head wounds tend to, and he keeps having to pause to wipe the blood out of his eyes. 

“Dai Li,” someone shouts, and Zuko is momentarily relieved. 

None of the guards are earthbenders, but that might be what it takes to disperse the crowd. He doesn’t like the Dai Li anymore than the next person—mind control, honestly, the idea makes his skin crawl—but he’s willing to give them a chance if they manage to break up this crowd. 

He had underestimated the Lower Ring’s fury. Even as the ground begins to shake and buck, the noise redoubles. That’s when the first shop goes up in flames. 

The alarm bells, still tolling, change in pitch and fervor. 

Beside him, Jianjun stumbles. Zuko catches the punch that had been heading toward his partner’s face, then breaks the would-be assailant’s arm. 

“Are you okay?”

No response. Zuko spares Jianjun a glance, takes in his glassy eyes, and shoves the man behind him. Right. A veteran off the Wall. Still able-bodied enough to be a soldier. No family to speak of. Honorably discharged, or he’d be in the mines now, not a guard. There had to be a reason for that discharge, and Zuko suspects he’s seeing it now. He knows shellshock when it shrinks into itself behind him. 

The blood. The screaming. The flames. 

They couldn’t have found a worse situation if they’d tried. 

Zuko reacts the same way when someone looms over him. He feels sick when flames, even his own, dance over his skin. Yeah, he knows what he’s looking at. 

The fire has tripled in size, but no one seems interested in doing anything about it. The crowd is trying to get away, but something is keeping them penned in. In the flickering light, Zuko can just make out a hastily raised earthen wall. 

The Dai Li. They’re even worse than he had thought if they’re willing to trap civilians—albeit rioting ones—this close to the flames. The crowd’s anger is gone, but panic is setting in. Someone is going to get trampled. 

He drags Jianjun further into the shadows of an alley, takes a deep breath, and reaches out toward the flames. 

It hasn’t rained in weeks, the beginnings of a drought further complicating the war effort. The wood in the Lower Ring is bone-dry, and the city is a tinderbox. The fire greets him cheerfully at first. It wants to spread, wants his help doing so. 

Zuko clamps down on it, orders it to go out, to stop, to freeze. It takes exception, and that’s when the fight really starts. 

He corrals it to the buildings it has already touched. It responds by doubling in height. Zuko grits his teeth, and the world narrows. It’s just him and the flames, a battle of wills. Zuko has lost plenty of those. He’s not about to lose another.

The fire goes out, and that’s shocking enough that the crowd pauses. 

“Show’s over,” Zuko rasps, then clears his throat. “Show’s over!” he repeats, loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. “Clear out.”

“The fire—” says one woman. 

“By order of the Ba Sing Se Guard,” Zuko shouts. “Disperse.”

He hefts his baton. 

He’s not sure what the people near him see. A pale, scarred face? Another anonymous enforcer of the rules smothering them? A child supporting an older, trembling man?

They look around, searching for somewhere to disperse to. The earthen walls drop as they do, which is their cue to scatter before the Dai Li can begin taking prisoners. 

Zuko looks around too, spots the nearest street sign, and sighs. It’s a long walk back to the station on 13th. He manages the same way he always does, and by the time he drags Jianjun up to the front desk to report their activities, his partner has almost stopped shaking. They return their borrowed armor and batons, undergo a quick examination to ensure they’re not going to die of their injuries, and then Zuko guides Jianjun back out onto the street.

“You’re coming home with me,” he says firmly.

“I’ll be alright, boy,” Jianjun says, although there’s none of the usual force behind his words. 

“You need tea and a full night’s rest,” Zuko argues.

Jianjun frowns at him. “That fire...it should have spread. It’s been so dry.”

Zuko shrugs. “We got lucky.”

“Your eyes are gold,” the older man says, and it’s as much an accusation as it is a realization. 

Zuko looks at him as steadily as he can manage. “Going to report me?”

“I think you saved my life tonight,” says Jianjun, still sounding shaken. That’s understandable. It’s been a hard night. “I think you saved a lot of lives. Spirits, boy. Fine. I don’t think there’s a rule against firebenders being members of the guard, anyway.”

“There’s not,” Zuko says peaceably, daring to relax. “I checked.”

"Of course you did," says Jianjun. "Why wouldn't you? No, don't answer that."


End file.
